Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you mess-up just one of these, it can all go horribly wrong. So what are these aspects that can ruin database design, and how can you get them right? Robert Sheldon explains.
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In a development team, there are times when the relationships between developers and testers can become strained. How can you turn this potential conflict into something more positive? Is it part of the skill of team-working to find ways of avoiding friction, or should one blame a system that relies on good social skills to work well?
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Daniel Calbimonte has written a code comparison for MariaDB vs. SQL Server as it pertains to how to comment, how to create functions and procedures with parameters, how to store query results in a text file, how to show the top n rows in a query, how to use loops, and more.
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Was the marketing hook 'The Internet of Things' conjured up before the technical definition? Are we being persuaded to spend money on fending off yet another fantasy tsunami of data? Already, we have televisions that listen to, and report, your conversations; so are we facing the Science Fiction future of gadgets that report where you go, who you visit and what medications you take? As Robert Sheldon says; "It's big, almost too big to get your arms around".
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It is no good doing some or most of the aspects of SQL Server security right. You have to get them all right, because any effective penetration of your security is likely to spell disaster. If you fail in any of the ways that Robert Sheldon lists and describes, then you can't assume that your data is secure, and things are likely to go horribly wrong.
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Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What, for example, do the BREAK, RETURN and CONTINUE keywords do in their various contexts? Robert Sheldon has the answers to this and other questions.
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Refactoring a database object can often cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses that object. In this article, adapted from his excellent book, Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server, Alex Kuznetsov discusses several techniques that will harden your code, so that it will not break, or behave unpredictably, as a result such changes.
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If you are aiming to optimise the use of your time by doing as much as possible via scripting, you will soon want to run scripts in parallel to save time. PowerShell does not demand that you run jobs one after the other; It has the means to launch actions whenever you wish and to obtain the results when you want them.
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SQL Server’s GROUP BY clause provides you a way to aggregate your SQL Server data and to group data on a single column, multiple columns, or even expressions. Greg Larsen discusses how to use the GROUP by clause to summarize your data.
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Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He then went on to create Tripod, which morphed eventually into Visual Basic in 1991. Alan remains enthusiastic and interested in development with strong views on Agile and Pair Programming.
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When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once you've identified the queries, what next? Dennes Torres gives some preliminary guidelines on how to find out why these index scans are being chosen for these queries and how to make the queries run faster and more efficiently.
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The job of a DBA requires a fusion of skill and knowledge. To acquire this requires a craftsman mindset. Craftsmen find that the better they get at the work, the more enjoyable the work gets, and the more successful they become. Deliberate practice, Specialization and an appetite for overcoming difficulty are good habits to deliberately adopt to successfully grow those craftsmanlike skills to the point that you become “so good they can’t ignore you”.
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